


Healing

by moreagaara



Series: Before the Imperium [3]
Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Blood Magic, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Character Study, Comfort, Cross-Post, Cross-Posted on deviantArt, Deviates From Canon, Fanfiction, Gen, Gore, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Literature, Mental Health Issues, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Originally Posted on deviantART, Platonic Cuddling, Posted Elsewhere, Pre-Canon, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-10-02 00:47:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20453714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara
Summary: We're getting to the end of the crazy Daenus saga, I swear.  This one wouldn't import properly either, but whatever, we got it up.Peep ownership:Games Workshop:  WH40k and relatedMe:  the writing and the Emperor's name





	Healing

**Author's Note:**

> We're getting to the end of the crazy Daenus saga, I swear. This one wouldn't import properly either, but whatever, we got it up.
> 
> Peep ownership:  
Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
Me: the writing and the Emperor's name

_Sleep. Sleep was what he needed. He needed it even more than he needed blood, or death…he let himself drift between states of consciousness, just as likely to find himself in the deep, dark hole as he was with the blood god or with his brother. With Horus. The blood god would always try to hurt him whenever he came there, so he started to turn away and drift somewhere else when he found himself looking at mountains. Horus, though…_

_Horus was gentle. Insistent, but gentle. He would make him look at things, or sit, or eat, and he kept touching him, talking to him. Dimly he realized that Horus—his touching, his talking—was keeping him connected to the place where he lived, wherever that was. Whatever it was. He had come to depend on his animal self to tell him what the things around him were, whether they were good or bad, to be avoided or not. It had taken over controlling his body, and seemed to instinctively understand the world Horus lived in, and wanted him to live in too._

_He couldn’t decide if he wanted that…_

~~*~~

There was a glimmer behind his brother’s eyes again. Daenus was back, at least for a while. What was left of him…he’d given too much of his mind over to his Beast—what he called the animal version of himself that he’d made. An animal he insisted he needed for safety, either to keep himself safe from the world, or the world safe from him; which depended mostly on his mood. Either way, it was giving him a dangerous level of detachment from reality, and Horus feared if this kept up, he might never heal.

He couldn’t tell if it was Daenus or his Beast that made him crawl over to where Horus sat and curl up in his lap. They both sought out comfort, and Horus seemed to be the greatest source of that in their now entirely-too-separate lives. He gently pulled his brother up to a sitting position, rocked him back and forth. Daenus quickly matched his breathing to the motion, then fell into a trance. He didn’t wake up even after Horus moved, and set him down in the sunshine.

He sighed; what he’d been doing so far had calmed his brother down significantly. Instead of attacking anything that so much as twitched in his vision, he was only enraging every few weeks. Unfortunately, it was taking more and more energy to pull him out of his aggressive moods, and Daenus had started to forget. Between his bouts of rage, his Beast tended to take control, and as an animal, it didn’t need much in the way of memory. That lack of need had started to bleed over into Daenus himself.

It was time to try something else. There was some leftover soup available; Horus heated it back up to a temperature that couldn’t burn his brother’s mouth, but still warm. It was risky to try and get his brother eat normal food; while enraged, he had developed a taste for human flesh, a taste that had bled over to his Beast. His Beast was likely to reject the soup as inedible, or worse, poison. Daenus, though…he might accept it. Maybe.

~~*~~

_His brother was holding him upright again. He tried to twist around to snuggle with him, but his brother made him stay sitting up, facing away from his brother. He mutely acquiesced, as Beast had decided to nap; so long as they were warm, it would not stir. And they were warm; his brother even held his arms and hands._

_Horus had wrapped his fingers around something, some tool…he stared at it, trying to summon the name of it up from the depths of his mind, but nothing stirred. There was a small, flat bowl at one end, and a long handle. His brother helped him grip it, and he appreciated that deeply. They were moving it now, towards a larger bowl that held something that steamed. He didn’t recognize the smell, but it didn’t smell like food._

_He turned his face away from the object that held some of the steaming substance at first, but his brother gently stopped him from turning too far. He was talking, saying something like how it was okay, he promised the stuff in the bowl was good. He shuddered, torn in indecision; on the one hand, everything in his mind told him that the stuff in the bowl wasn’t food, but on the other hand…Horus had never hurt him._

_He held still, allowed his brother to help him place the object’s burden of steaming liquid in his mouth. He closed his mouth, held the liquid there to taste it properly. It didn’t taste bad; this wasn’t poison. There was a meat-taste to it, and other tastes he didn’t recognize. Perhaps it was okay…he swallowed with hesitation._

_Nothing happened. He didn’t feel any different, neither better nor worse. He allowed his brother to help him get another portion of the liquid, and place it in his mouth; he held it there for some time again before swallowing. Still he felt no different, but he decided he liked the varied flavor in the liquid. His brother continued to help him eat the liquid, and he kept allowing it, until it was gone. When it was, he felt…full. Content._

_His brother was thanking him, telling him he’d done really well at something. He liked the praise, even though he wasn’t sure what it was for. But Beast was right about it being time for a nap, so he curled into his brother’s body and did just that._

~~*~~

“Thank the gods,” Horus whispered, rocking Daenus gently. Somehow he’d been cooperative through the entire bowl of soup, and had eaten all of it without fuss. Maybe, just maybe, this would work…maybe Horus could set the situation up so that Daenus needed his human self more than his Beast.

He thought critically about what he’d done just before Daenus had eaten the soup that might have helped. A trance. The Beast must have slipped into a trance, and there must have been a moment where Daenus had been awake while it had not been. Perhaps Horus could take advantage of that…for now, though, he just held his brother and rocked him.

After a while, he looked at his brother, and tried to see him the way an outsider might. There was an unhealthy cast to his skin; a combination of lack of sunlight and malnutrition from his recent diet of Horus’s flesh. He had no excess flesh; in some places, the important veins were too close to the surface of his skin, and Horus could watch his irregular heartbeat. All over his body, his skin was stretched taut over too-hard muscles, showing definition he really shouldn’t have had; at least, he shouldn’t have had it if normal biology had anything to say about the subject. Horus pondered that, gently weighing his brother in his arms; he was both much too light and much too heavy, and his weight wasn’t well distributed.

He carefully took one of his brother’s hands and felt the bones there, the joints in particular. There was a certain stiffness to his joints; not enough to stop him from moving the fingers, but inarguably there. The fingers in particular _did _feel too heavy, and now he was examining them closely, they seemed just a tad larger and thicker than they should be, and when he released them, they quickly returned to a slightly curled state. Strange.

His brother moaned in his sleep—his trances regularly took him to a depth of unconsciousness that might as well be called sleep—and Horus gently felt his forehead. There was a subtle, growing heat there. Daenus’s hands and feet were starting to twitch; his face began twisting in on itself, his upper lip trembled, occasionally baring a tooth. His eyelids fluttered, and Horus noted that the shimmer of gold behind his eyes he had seen just a few moments ago was entirely gone, replaced with a deep crimson that was even now starting to bleed out of his irises and into the surrounding whites.

_He’s not sleeping through this one._

Horus had just enough time to block Daenus’s access to his throat with a hand before his brother surged back to wakefulness and started trying to rip him apart. By now, Horus could easily predict his movements and attacks, and either block or dodge every single one. He noticed now that each block or dodge infuriated Daenus more, sent him deeper into a screaming berserker rage. The next block, he deliberately turned so that his brother had full access to his belly; as he suspected, his brother took the opportunity to gut him.

Horus grabbed onto the wall to keep himself standing while his brother pulled his intestines out, alternately clawing and biting them. He squeezed his eyes shut, bore the pain with deepest effort, focused his attention on keeping his blood where it was. Daenus didn’t seem to notice that his brother wasn’t bleeding, however; Horus cracked one eye open to watch him, and saw his brother had tangled himself in Horus’s intestines while batting his spleen around. A length of small intestine had gotten wrapped around his throat without his notice.

His hand was shaking as he reached for the nearest piece of intestine and grabbed it. He gasped for air; he heard his brother bellowing furiously—likely out of confusion—as the organ unwrapped itself from around his body and recoiled itself properly in Horus’s stomach cavity. Horus breathed heavily, and regrew the missing spleen, then steadily healed the abdominal muscle Daenus had clawed open. The traumatized muscles kept spasming, slowing the healing; Horus took his time with the process; when the muscle was finally reattached to itself, and the skin was starting to regrow, Horus sank to his knees and reopened his eyes.

Daenus had apparently lost interest in him, and had returned his attention to the spleen he’d taken. Horus’s heart twisted, and he bit back a sob; he’d seen cats get absorbed in toys in about the same way. Horus did his best to calm his own seething adrenaline; eventually his brother would look back over, and perhaps if Horus was calm when he did, Daenus might calm too. Eventually, Daenus did look over, but rather than calming, he froze and started to tremble. Then, whining so quietly Horus wasn’t sure he even heard the sound, Daenus collapsed in a nerveless heap.

~~*~~

_“I killed him this time, I’m sure of it! He made a mistake, but he never makes a mistake, but he did this time…” Daenus muttered to himself, partway up the slope of the mountains. He had stopped there to catch his breath while his body played with some organ torn from his oppressor’s flesh. The mountains had started to rumble after a time, had noticed his presence, and now were beginning to attack him in a rather casual way._

_Then he made the mistake of looking out through his body’s eyes at what he had done; he had expected to see his oppressor a crumpled heap on the floor, but instead, he stood tall, and just as healthy as ever. He had been truly afraid to see it, and was only getting more afraid. His blood god had noticed him, and was sending something after him. The only escape was into the hole in his mind, the one where all sensation failed and all thought died, but the hole was across the blood-churned sea at the base of the mountains._

_And the mountains wouldn’t let him down. He had been able to move just two steps from his original position, and was even now trapped by gaping holes that kept opening and closing just in front of him, where he intended to leap off his rock, making the jump too far for him to clear. He screamed when a massive arm grabbed him around the chest; he did his best to fight, and drew a few scratches on his captor, but they just laughed at him._

_Then they threw him up the slope with enough force to shatter his backbone. Daenus tried to get back up and move despite it, tried to shamble enough of a spinal column together that he could at least sort of stand, but he had to use blood magic to do that. The ground suddenly seared with heat, shattering his concentration, and thousands of claws dug into his skin. Somehow not having a spine didn’t stop him from feeling pain._

_He shrieked as the claws peeled his skin back, writhed as they scooped the powderized remains of bone out of his back, howled when a heavy, clawed hand grabbed his hair and made him look up. “The blood god is feeling…generous,” a weirdly familiar voice echoed from a bestial red face. The claws were putting something into his back now…something that stabbed him with every movement._

~~*~~

Horus rushed to his brother’s side; Daenus was screaming, wildly flailing on the floor, and his back—something was seriously wrong with his back. Something shifted and humped under his skin. Something was moving his spine out of position, flattening out the double curve that meant he could stand upright, like a human. Horus panicked; he had to stop whatever the hells this was, and so he did the only thing he could.

He grabbed his pocket knife and sliced his brother’s back open down the middle, directly through the worst of the twisting. His brother screamed louder; something other than Horus nearly pulled his spine out through the cut. When that force let go, the spine returned to a position where, if his brother were to heal, it would be partially exposed through the skin. Horus didn’t have the time to clean his knife. He sliced his palms open and placed them on either side of his brother’s abused spine, then _pressed_.

~~*~~

_Some force flung Daenus’s tormenters away. Some force that glittered with red-gold light spilled out of his torn back. Something gave him the strength to stand back up, humped as he was, and stumble down the mountainside. He didn’t question it; whatever it was, it shielded him from further attack from the mountains and the blood god, and was therefore helpful._

_With its help, he made it to the blood-red sea that divided his consciousness into fragments. He fell gratefully into its surf, let it do the hard work of carrying his broken body where it willed. Two forces tugged at him now, one frantic and trying to make him wake, and one whispering softly of sleep: deep, dreamless, thoughtless sleep. He hurt too badly to move, to think. He reached for the second force._

_The ocean carried him over the edge of a waterfall, and into his hole. The worlds receded above him. His eyes closed; he slept._

~~*~~

Daenus’s body utterly relaxed in Horus’s arms. For a moment, nothing fought him. Nothing was there to fight him. He decided to worry about the flashes he’d seen echo through his mind from his brother’s later; for now, he carefully eased his brother’s spine back where it belonged. He restored its usual curve, reattached muscles that had gotten misaligned somehow…Horus could hardly believe the extent of the damage.

Daenus’s Beast was watching him quietly as he finished; his hands were shaking worse than when he’d nearly collapsed from pain, after Daenus had ripped his intestines free only a few minutes ago. His Beast, however, was looking up at him with unshakeable trust in its eyes. Red, but not the terrifying deep crimson of a rage.

Horus took a shuddering breath. The Beast purred, but didn’t move; Horus would have stopped it had it tried. Daenus’s backbone could easily dislocate if moved too early. It would be several days before they could move. Not for the first time, Horus wished his father was there; Crawyen would have been able to fully heal Daenus, probably even pulled his mind out of the rut it was in now. If not him, then their mother could have done it…

But their parents weren’t there. Daenus was stuck with only Horus to help him, so Horus tried to call him out from under the Beast’s mostly benign influence. “Do you remember the Eiffel Tower?” he asked. Another memory from a time before any of this, when Daenus had been well; Horus had not been present at this one, and only knew of this incident from Daenus’s letters on the subject.

The Beast hummed, and blinked slowly once. Usually that meant it could see the memory Horus was talking about, so Horus kept going. “Do you remember what you wrote to me? That the person who built it wanted to tear it down after a few years? You were…so against that in your letter…”

“Wasn’th’only one…” Daenus mumbled. His eyes were closed; he spoke so rarely these days that Horus treasured these precious few moments. It was a weird state; Daenus was neither awake nor asleep, neither Beast, nor raging, nor himself…yet only in these states could he even come close to full sentences. “Wouln’ff maddered…woulduff torn…tear…ripped…” Daenus took a deep breath and kept going. “Took. Thtower…down. Jussss never…did.”

“Heh. I guess not…it was still standing when I visited…recently,” Horus answered. He didn’t dare mention when he had visited Paris, or under what circumstances. He’d had to report to the French capital to explain why he suddenly had to leave the war almost immediately upon arrival, and after he’d campaigned so hard to come. In the end, he’d had to force the issue by mind controlling his superior officers into discharging him because of a fictitious wound.

“…was…girl,” Daenus was saying. “Sh’wasss…pretty. Kiss…under Tower. Fffireworgss…new year…” His eyes were shuttling back and forth under his lids faster than normal. “Wanned’t…marry. She…she sssaaay she…”

“Daenus, be careful—” Horus began, but didn’t have to finish. His brother’s arm and hand had twitched, about to reach for something, but the second he’d tried, the pain had made him pass out before finishing his sentence. Horus sighed. Daenus and their father were too similar for Horus’s taste; they both had a habit of getting involved with many people—gender wasn’t terribly important to either of them, just the feelings involved—and letting go of the ties they formed just as easily as they made them in the first place.

Horus however…he’d never been able to do that. It took him years—decades even—to warm up to someone. Sarah had so far been the only woman stubborn enough to coax him into openness in twelve thousand years. And after the play five years ago, when they’d come back to Horus’s farm…

He’d sworn in three dozen different languages when he saw the unfamiliar truck parked outside the front door. He didn’t even remember getting out of his own truck and to his front door, but he had gone dead silent when he’d found the lock shot off. He’d pushed the door open so cautiously, prepared for anything, and hadn’t been terribly surprised at the carnage inside. He had been so focused on finding his brother and getting him to the basement—to safety, both for Daenus and for everyone around him—that he hadn’t noticed that Sarah had followed him.

He didn’t blame her for a second. To find out that the person she had been planning to marry kept a creature that could simply rip people to shreds with nothing but brute force was bad enough. To learn that that creature was his brother? Had their positions been reversed, Horus would have left too. At the time, he hadn’t been certain that Sarah had been wrong about how it might be kinder to just kill Daenus rather than constantly run the risk of him escaping. At least now, he had some hope that he’d been right to keep trying.


End file.
